Blog Action Day 2011 Blog Post: Food

Two years ago, I participated in Blog Action Day for the first time. That year, the topic was "climate change." This year the topic is the less specific "food." (I can imagine plenty of blog posts featuring favorite recipes or odes to chocolate.)

This year Blog Action Day is scheduled to coincide with World Food Day, October 16. According to its own blog, 2,250 bloggers from 100 countries are participating in a global conversation about food.

I thought I might just revisit some of my previous posts about food and beverages. (I missed last year's topic, "water," which is the most common and, arguably, the world's most important beverage.) It turned out there are not many of them, at least not many that have been tagged for easy reference. Still, a few jump out and, as you will see, certain shared themes emerge from them.

My latest food-related item was posted in July, marking National Ice Cream Month. Previous to that (on April 7, 2010) was one that drew attention to a bizarre kind of Easter candy, and the one before that was an odd report about some New Zealand scientists who advised people to eat their pets as a way to save the environment.

It seems that there's something about food in the news that brings out weirdness, since I also noted the existence of "cock soup" on the shelves at Kroger back in June 2009, and in March of that year I wrote about the Oakdale Testicle Festival. Then in October of 2008, there was a report of a political candidate who was denying his opponent's calumnious accusations that he was a vegetarian.

On a more serious note, in the wake of then-current reports of "tainted tomatoes" across the country, in June 2008, I republished an old article of mine about the benefits of food irradiation, a topic that could be revisited in light of the recent listeria-infected cantaloupes scare in the United States. A few days earlier, I looked at the food policy of the U.S. government in a post called "How Congress Makes Us Fat."

Three days previous to that, I looked back at the 1996 Democratic National Convention and how the journalists there engaged in a literal "feeding frenzy" each afternoon, when the DNC hosts laid out a big buffet catered by local Chicago restaurants.

More sentimentally, on February 3, 2008, on what would have been my mother's 70th birthday, I recalled how she liked to entertain with food, particularly on occasions like Super Bowl Sunday.

The previous November, I discovered a favorite recipe of foot-tapping Senator Larry Craig, an odd concoction that involves pushing a hot dog through the center of a baked potato. (I am not making this up.)

More nostalgia came up when I found an article in the Marquette Tribune about a durable Milwaukee tradition, the Friday night fish fry.

One of my favorite odd-food stories was the one about the clergyman who discovered that eating soy products results in homosexuality. (Tofu does what?)

In terms of beverages, my favorite post has to be the one I published on the 25th anniversary of the introduction of New Coke. You would have thought Netflix had learned from that episode before introducing Quikster.

Speaking of anniversaries, it's hard to talk about beverages without talking about alcoholic ones -- so I celebrated the 75th anniversary of the repeal of the Prohibition amendment, on December 5, 2008.

That, of course, suggests cocktails, including the recipe for Alter Kaker, which linguist Michael Wex published as a "Yiddish mixed drink."

In the end, however, realizing the sobriety (no pun intended) of the topic adopted by the people behind Blog Action Day, I decided to focus on the darker side of food -- that is, hunger.

I found a book review I wrote while I was in graduate school about the Ethiopian famine of the 1980s. The Horn of Africa is currently experiencing a serious drought, which is hitting Somalia particularly hard. While parts of Ethiopia and Kenya have also been affected, drought there has not turned into widespread famine as it did in the 1980s because the governments there are now far more responsive to the needs and wants of their people. Ethiopia overthrew the Stalinist Mengistu regime in the early '90s, and Kenya has been having democratic elections since Daniel arap Moi was forced from power more than a decade ago.

Both countries, while far from perfect, are far more open to free enterprise than they were in the 1970s and 1980s, and -- has history has shown -- while drought may occur in free-market economies, drought in such countries does not turn into famine. (Somalia is still a basket case, divided by clan rivalries and beset by terrorist groups with ties to al-Qaeda.)

What follows is my review of Breakfast in Hell, by Myles Harris.

RICHARD SINCERE
A Doctor’s Story Of Deliberate Famine And an African Hitler 

Breakfast in Hell: A Doctor’s Experiences of the Ethiopian Famine, by Myles Harris, Picador, London, $4.85, 221 pp. 


In the play Man of La Mancha, the poet Cervantes explains what impelled a plain country squire toward becoming the knight Don Quixote: “Being retired, he has much time for books. . . . All he reads oppresses him, fills him with indignation at man’s murderous ways toward man.”

This is one of those books. Breakfast in Hell came to my attention through an article by the author in The Spectator, the British public affairs weekly. The title was “The Regime That Kills Ethiopians,” and that sums up the whole story. It would be extraordinarily difficult to come away from Myles Harris’s account of the state-imposed famine in Ethiopia without profound anger and indignation.

Myles Harris is a medical doctor who has worked all over the world caring for the malnourished, ill-housed, poorly clothed and impoverished people who make up such a large number of us. Prior to his six months in Ethiopia with the Red Cross, he and his wife Janet had worked in undeveloped regions in Papua New Guinea, Australia and the Kalahari Desert.

It is clear from the outset that Harris went to Ethiopia with few, if any, preconceptions of what he would encounter there. The Red Cross needed medical personnel to work in famine areas, and he responded to their call. He had no trouble adopting the apolitical life of a Red Cross delegate and wanted only to help suffering Ethiopians.

He emerged from the country half a year later with bitter feelings toward the Mengistu regime, toward international aid agencies and toward petty Communist Party officials who blocked genuine humanitarian relief; he has fond and loving memories of his Ethiopian co-workers and the farmers, townspeople, young mothers and children he encountered in the feeding camps and medical stations.

Harris writes vividly and pulls no punches. He compares the Emperor Mengistu (as he calls Ethiopia’s Marxist military dictator) to Hitler and Stalin; indeed, reading some of the descriptions of Mengistu’s atrocities makes one think Adolph and Joe were mere pranksters.

For instance: The Soviets, as part of their aid to keep him on his throne, sent a unit of the East German Volkspolizei, “a secret police force with one of the finest pedigrees in suppression in the world. . . . At the time of the Ethiopian terror in 1977, some of the most senior Volkspolizei officers had once been serving members of the Gestapo. For, at the end of the Second World War, the capitulation of half the Third Reich to the Russians had meant little more for them than. . . swapping a swastika for a red star, before it was business as usual.”

The business these ex-Gestapo henchmen taught Mengistu was the need for a memorable terror to bring all Ethiopians into his iron grip. “Mengistu searched his heart for the most terrible thing he could do to bring his people through fear to the truth of Marxism-Leninism, and he thought of burial. Ethiopians hold burial to be one of the most important rites of life. To die unburied, to be forgotten in death, is so awful that even today those who whisper to you their memories of the Terror can hardly bring themselves to speak of this part of it…. [Mengistu] ordered that the bodies of the slain should lie unburied, and that those who tried to take them for burial were themselves to be slaughtered. One morning, the people of Addis woke to streets filled with corpses and a sky dark with vultures.” Later, “the lampposts were strung with corpses, not of men, but of young school boys who had tried and failed to rescue their fathers’ and brothers’ bodies for burial. . . . When it was over, of the 5,000 students at the University of Addis Ababa, only 1,500 were still alive.”

That excerpt exposes the minds of men who would, among other things, padlock food warehouses for days and weeks, refusing to give relief workers access to the tools of their trade; who would refuse hospital admission to obviously sick and dying children whose parents lacked the proper papers from the local farmers’ association, papers that took five days or longer to obtain; who would ship truckloads of grain from the famine-stricken north of the country to the healthier and more fertile south, where it was stored for unknown reasons -- perhaps for later shipment to the masters in Moscow. These are men who forbid the sale of yeast to Ethiopian citizens in order to secure a government monopoly on the baking and selling of bread.

Harris spares nearly no one from his understated but strongly felt wrath. The Red Cross and other relief agencies get criticism for trying too hard to work with and please the government -- a government that wants to keep the Red Cross from doing its job. At one point, he tries to explain this to his superiors:

“We had done exactly what we had been instructed to do by Geneva: emptied the camps of all except the very ill and returned the rest of the people to their villages.

“But each success would have found little favor with the Ethiopians. Suddenly, they had been washed into the center of a disaster worse than the First World War.

Confused and frightened, their only remedy -- huge feeding programs -- seemed the only rock to cling to. Then we came along and tried to close down their camps. Closing down their operation implied their failure, and, as in most aid programs, threatened bureaucratic livelihoods. Famine camps meant foreign aid, foreign aid meant jobs.”

Hitler, Stalin and Mao share one positive characteristic — they are all dead. But Mengistu and the communists who rule Ethiopia with him are alive and dripping with the blood of their countrymen. Why, then, do Western governments, the United Nations and Bob Geldof’s Band-Aid continue to send them money that perpetuates their tyranny?

Richard Sincere, a Washington writer, is currently pursuing post-graduate studies in international relations at the London School of Economics.

NOTE: This review originally appeared in the Washington Times on Monday, June 1, 1987, and in the New York City Tribune on Wednesday, June 3, 1987. It has been crossposted from Book Reviews by Rick Sincere, where it appeared on January 9, 2010.

Blast from the Past

While going through some old VHS videotapes in my collection -- many of them with no identifying marks -- I came across this promotional video made for the Ethics and Public Policy Center in 1985, shortly after the Center published my first book.

This is a fascinating look back at the political climate of the mid-1980s. While many of the domestic issues discussed in the video are still current (especially with regard to education policy), images of the menacing Soviet threat seem like a relic from another century -- which, of course, they are -- but no less frightening for that.

Besides myself, this video includes cameo appearances by Ronald Reagan, Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, Bill Bennett, Casper Weinberger, Chester Finn, Linda Chavez, Orrin Hatch, Yonas Deressa, Ethiopian bishop Abba Mathias, and others. EPPC staff members who appear and in the video include founding president Ernest W. Lefever and Robert Royal, now with the Faith and Reason Institute. Alert viewers might catch a passing glance of other staffers, such as Raymond English, Carol Griffith, and Margaret Webb. Really alert viewers will see the faces of Elaine Rendler, David Rothbard, John Chettle, John Montgomery, and various journalists, think-tank scholars, and academics in the scenes of seminars and conferences.

What is refreshing about this video, which was, as I said, made for promotional purposes, is that there is no direct appeal for financial contributions to the Center. This was no doubt what the Center's directors had in mind when they authorized the video's production, but their reticence to ask for money in so many words is admirable.

What is striking, too, about the video is that it is more than just a brochure-made-for-television. It has a narrative arc, as a good documentary film should have, and it ties together its disparate elements in a thematic fashion. It does so effectively. I don't know -- or, rather, don't remember -- who wrote the script, but whoever it was should be proud of the accomplishment. It wouldn't win an Oscar for Best Documentary-Short Subject, but it is well-crafted and much better than similar videos of this genre from that era.

A small portion of this video could be used as a commercial for my book, The Politics of Sentiment. It also includes a snippet of my first appearance on CNN, in an early incarnation of Crossfire with Pat Buchanan and Tom Braden (the inspiration for the character played by Dick Van Patten on Eight Is Enough). My opponent in the crossfire that evening was Dr. Helen Caldicott of Physicians for Social Responsibility and we were discussing civil defense policy. Somewhere I have a Betamax recording of that entire program, and I am flummoxed as far as figuring out how to convert it to DVD and then to AVI or Windows Media.

(At nearly 13 minutes, this clip is too long to post on YouTube in one piece, but fortunately Blogger now includes video upload capability. This is my first attempt to post a video directly through Blogger, rather than posting it on YouTube first and then embedding the code in my blogpost. You bloggers will understand the difference.)

Photoblogging Ethiopia

One of the first things to strike a new visitor to Ethiopia is the pervasiveness of English. All the street signs, and the vast majority of billboards and storefront signs, are either in English only or in English and Amharic.

I asked about this and was told that, shortly after the Second World War, Emperor Haile Selassie ordered that English become the medium of instruction in all Ethiopian high schools. Since some 40 percent of the population attends at least some high school, learning English is common enough that it seems everyone understands it. After 60 years, the teaching and learning of English is embedded in Ethiopian life.

This has proved useful in uniting a country with about a dozen major ethnic groups, countless sub-groups and clans, and at least 45 major spoken languages and dialects (including Amharic, Tigrinya, Somali, and Oromo, to name just four). Government documents are issued in both Amharic and English, and sometimes in other vernacular languages, as well. Television news is broadcast in English. English-language newspapers report on local and world affairs. And this in a country that was never colonized by either Britain or the United States!

Here are some photographs I took while I was in Ethiopia earlier this month. Mind you, I was on a business trip, so sightseeing was not on the agenda. Consequently, most pictures I took were from my hotel room balcony, except for a few that I took while on Entoto, the 10,000-foot-above-sea-level mountain overlooking the 7,200-foot-above-sea-level plain where Addis Ababa is located. We had a few hours free one afternoon, and we were taken to see the two oldest churches in Addis Ababa.


Upon waking up in Addis Ababa (and other African cities, for that matter), one immediately notices the acrid odor in the air. This comes from wood-burning fires that people use to cook their breakfasts. A heavy smog hangs over the city in the morning hours, but it dissipates during the late morning and afternoon, only to return in the evening as families cook their suppers. (In the middle distance, you can see the blue tower of a mosque.)

In Addis, the smoke takes on an added aroma in that it comes from the burning of blue eucalyptus, a non-native species of tree that was imported to provide firewood in the barren plateau. Today you can see old women coming down the mountain carrying heavy stacks of branches, more than twice as tall as the women themselves, to sell as firewood in the city. The lucky ones have donkeys but most of them use their own muscles and bent spines to do the job.



This view, from the same vantage point but a slightly different angle, shows the evening smog hanging over Addis Ababa.



Ethiopian history stretches back at least 3,000 years, so one might suppose that the capital city, Addis Ababa, is nearly that old. Not so -- it was founded only in 1886, about the same time as Johannesburg, South Africa.

King (later Emperor) Menelik II moved his court to Entoto, a mountain base in the center of Shoa (the region of central Ethiopia where Addis now is). A small city grew up along the road between two Ethiopian Orthodox churches.

Queen (later Empress) Taitu, however, did not like the cold weather in the mountains. She moved her camp to the side of a hot spring on the plain below. She sent a message to her husband that said, essentially, "If you ever want to get some from me again, you had better move here." So he did, taking his whole court down the mountain and establishing the city now known as Addis Ababa.

What you see above is the oldest church in Addis, only a bit over a 100 years old despite the culture's 3,000-year track record.



Besides Armenia, Ethiopia may be the oldest Christian nation in the world. (There are now a large number of Muslims in the country, too, but for centuries it was officially Christian in the sense that Russia and Greece are.)

There are differences, however, between Ethiopian Orthodoxy and other Orthodox and Latin churches. For one thing, the Ethiopian Orthodox Church is monophysite -- that is, it rejects the doctrine, adopted at the Council of Chalcedon, of the "dual nature " of Christ. That is, whereas other Christian churches believe that Jesus Christ is "fully human and fully divine," the Ethiopian Orthodox believe that he is only fully divine.

Another difference: Ethiopian Orthodox Christians adhere to Old Testament dietary restrictions. So there were no pork products available in any of the restaurants at the Sheraton Addis Hotel, explaining why I had my first taste of "veal bacon."



This deacon was studying his prayer book in the sunshine outside the church.



Meanwhile, some priests and deacons were conducting a service of some sort (it might have been a funeral) at the base of the church, not inside it.














Finally, for those of you who have been wondering what happened to all those ubiquitous red telephone booths in Britain, after British Telecom decided to get rid of them, at least some of them landed in Ethiopia, where they are still used by the many people unable to afford cellphone service:



If you are interested in learning more about the history of Ethiopia, I recommend a book by retired U.S. diplomat Paul Henze called Layers of Time: A History of Ethiopia. I bought a copy just before I left the country and read it on the plane on the way home, answering a lot of the questions that had come to mind during my stay.